Ten Years of Reverse Engineering
RolfRolles <rolfrollesgmailcom> Wednesday, June 6 2007 22:22.39 CDT


Today is my 10th-year anniversary doing reverse engineering. :)  Despite starting for the wrong reason, the only thing that I regret is not having spent more time on mathematics.

Comments
Piotr Posted: Wednesday, June 6 2007 23:44.40 CDT


Huh happy reverse-birthday then :) Anyway i also regret the mathematics thing.

P.S
You really know the exact date of you starting? Seems i'm bit jealous because i can't remember my own :)

RolfRolles Posted: Wednesday, June 6 2007 23:53.22 CDT
Thank you Piotr :)  June 6th, 1997 is the earliest date that I can find in my ancient HD's d:\projects\mine directory (home to all sorts of lame stuff ;)

The next day my friend's annoyed father asked me how to disable SI/DOS as it was preventing him from running Windows :-)

MohammadHosein Posted: Thursday, June 7 2007 00:32.32 CDT
speaking of math , you got it right and its good news
bad news is you got to be young to dive into math , and persuading wrong ideas for years one day you realize you aint young no more :)

anyway happy areversary rolf

aeppert Posted: Thursday, June 7 2007 08:21.22 CDT
Congratulations.  I will hit my 16th anniversary this fall.

I will third the mathematics bit - I should have completed the old math double major (3-4 classes short actually...)  But, I kind of force myself into a project from time to time as a means of remembering and/or learning something.

pedram Posted: Thursday, June 7 2007 14:10.19 CDT
Wow you guys survived that long in this field? ;-)

Probably around year 5 myself. I figure in another 5 I'll be sick of it.

chrisr Posted: Thursday, June 7 2007 16:42.34 CDT
I'm somewhere around 5 as well. I too, wish I had better math skills.

Piotr Posted: Friday, June 8 2007 02:50.10 CDT
Huh old-boys :)

dennis Posted: Friday, June 8 2007 07:09.59 CDT
Are we talking about professional experience? ;-)
I for my part began "playing" with x86 assembly language around twelve years ago, followed by in-depth interest in assembly language and analysis of small, specific parts of programs (if you know what I mean). My reverse engineering experience evolved over the time, so I'm asking myself for how long I've really done "reverse engineering" so far.

aeppert Posted: Friday, June 8 2007 09:11.07 CDT
10 years professionally.  6 years prior actually learning the specifics, with the occasional "professional" gig along the way.  Burn out is high in this field which is why I attempt, mostly in vain, to try new things constantly.

I started out RE'ing audio file formats (XM, S3M, etc) as a means of understanding a signature for them (file(1)-related) and progressed on to analyzing the specifics of viruses as I collected them.  

I find hardware related RE to be the most interesting over time and it has a tendency to hold one's attention a bit longer, albeit the cost of a "mistake" is exponentially higher :)

shirkdog Posted: Wednesday, June 27 2007 10:23.52 CDT
Brave n00b here, I have at best 10 months.

I did some low level stuff like dennis in school, but it was academic and without proper knowledge of assembly (i.e., the ability to use the instructors code).

Congrats to RolfRolles and aeppert for as pedram said, for not getting sick of this stuff. :)

sebastianapelt Posted: Wednesday, June 27 2007 17:34.04 CDT
10 yrs... o_O  wow, congrats =)
for me it's ~1,5 yrs and i only regret that i didn't start earlier with it..

btw, i study maths. i must say it's interesting, but it can also be SO annoying.. :)